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Saturday, December 31, 2016

So, for Chile, we more or less had our act together. Had researched the place ahead of time. Got the boat well ready. The same with South Georgia.

Those were places where being unprepared was unlikely to make things better for us.

Since then, however, we've been sort of letting things fall into place as they will.

Take Cuba, for instance. Our decision to come here was made quite last minute. So no travel guides for us. No field guides to the birds of Cuba. No visits to the 'sailing to Cuba' Facebook pages before we came. (God forbid).

As a result,there have been some surprises along the way. The most notable of these was when we checked in, and the officials took about half of our onboard cash in visa fees. This left us...rather light on purchasing power for the rest of the trip. Oops. We were a little hazy on whether our US ATM card would work here or not. The answer would be no.

But, for all that, there has been a certain joy in just letting things happen as they would. And even our cash shortage has been something of an odd blessing. Without at all romanticizing any hardship that individual Cubans might be facing, this is a place where it feels right to be making careful choices about where to spend our money instead of carelessly saying 'yes' to some chance offer to break open the cruising fund. And we find that when we really do not have the money to simply pay the going tourist rate, options that are both cheaper AND more fun seem to magically present themselves.

And, for us fundamentally (I think) rational westerners it is simply fun to play things by ear a bit. There is a tremendously distressing paradigm in the American 'cruising' milieu which holds that the entire world is simply a puzzle that needs to be adequately researched to be understood. Traveling the world in a sailboat is reduced to a thousand utilitarian details of filling propane bottles and having the proper map app on your phone. The ends are nothing, the means all.

Which bores me completely to tears.

And, when it comes to the actual travel, it seems that research ahead of time can often just funnel you into the most obvious choices. Like our day trip to the 'must-see' colonial city of Trinidad. It was very pretty and all, but you end up just staring at other tourists at places like that, and at locals trying to sell you a hat for a week's wages.

Much better to judge a country by chance interactions with fishermen looking to make a trade, or with disinterested locals on the street who suddenly find their day made by some ridiculous Spanish mis-usage that you bring forth, or by the deserted anchorages that don't merit much space in the cruising guides.

Planning ahead doesn't help much with that stuff.

~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!

What you might not have known about Cuba is how very nice the people are.

I hate to paint a whole society with such a broad brush, but there it is.

That was something I sorta vaguely remembered from my previous visit here 19 years ago.

And it was reinforced by our time at Cayo Rosario. One day a fishing boat came through the pass and motored over to us, holding up big lobsters that they had on offer.

No thanks, we had enough lobster.

So then they handed across four bonito tuna. I asked what they wanted in return. Earlier boats had been very specific in what they wanted. Cooking oil, instant coffee, boat gear.

Give us whatever you want! They replied.

They didn't want cooking oil. We didn't have much rum and beer to trade. I explained that we were nearly out of cash.

No. No money, said the young captain. And then, when I tried to hand the tuna back, they just waved and smiled and drove away.

Once again on Galactic we discovered that there is nothing more humbling than a gift from someone who has much less than you.

Or consider the three caretakers on Cayo Cantiles, where a population of monkeys supplies subjects for medical research in Havana.

When we went ashore to visit, the caretakers were so kind in the way that they took us to see the local crocodile that had been trained to eat from the hand, and led us on a walk around the island, and then invited us to sit down and share their lunch of spaghetti after the walk. They had only four dishes, so we sat at the table and ate, and then they ate after we had gone. There was a dignity and an honest warmth in the way that they dealt with us. Our communications were limited, and I found their country accents even more difficult to follow than the accent of Cienfuegos. But over a few days of brief interactions we built a real reservoir of good will on both sides.

So I suppose that is the sort of wealth that we our building up for ourselves with this near-decade of family travel. Moments like those that we shared with the three sunburned grinning men on Cayo Cantiles - we'll always have those moments as a part of our family history, and as a part of us.

~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!

Thursday, December 29, 2016

We never found the key to Cienfuegos. Our stay was so vanishingly short.

We saw the way that families gather on the malecon at night, the sea-side walk, to drink and laugh and talk.

We walked the city in the day when the sun was so hot and the touts tried to steer us into the restaurants and the bicitaxi drivers called out to us.

I walked the city one night when I was more camouflaged by the dark and could wander through the dense neighborhoods away from the districts where visitors go and I could pass through the crowds of people passing the chattering night.

Cienfuegos is not a city of devices. It is not a place of zombies who are forever lulled into inanimation by the screens in their hands. I am not romanticizing the non-internet-saturated state of Cuba, but just noting how strange it first seemed when people in other cities began to serve their screen masters before all other things, and how strange the earlier condition now looks when you see it, of an entire city that is not filled with people who are mostly staring at their own hands.

I saw that in the 20 years I have been gone spandex has gone firmly out of style in Cuba. Demure dress has however not declared itself. The customs agent at the marina wore the most shocking combination of smart uniform jacket, short short skirt, and bondage/hooker stockings that I have ever seen in nine and a half years of having dealings with customs agents in various ports of the world.

Male drivers, which appears nearly to be a repetitive usage, still honk their horns hopefully/appreciatively when passing women of reproductive age. Our taxi driver made the sign of the cross before setting off on the journey back from the colonial city of Trinidad. Great, I thought to myself. Even in this land of perpetual revolution, we still get a taxi with no seat belts and a driver who trusts in equal measure to fatalism, extremely fast driving and passing on blind curves, and the sign of the cross.

We saw the way that visitors here are from another planet, are from places where the basic conditions and expectations of life are very different.

The touts and taxi drivers pursued us with great determination, but also with politeness. Cienfuegos appears to be a place where people are struggling mightily to get by, and wealthy foreigners who do not know the price of things are a great natural resource.

We were shown many restaurants priced in hard currency when we went for our one lunch out. The places were as fancy as they were deserted. When we demurred at the prices the staff immediately offered to bargain.

We found our way to a place priced in Cuban pesos that was both dirtier, though clean enough, and much busier than the hard currency places. Here my Spanish failed me when we were face with the choice of rice dishes to go with the meal. (My Spanish is, charitably, crap, and the accent is dramatically different here than it is in Chile.) Half the restaurant ended up being involved in our choice as I was reduced to pointing at plates on other tables. When the light went on and I dug up "morros and christos" - beans and rice - from my last visit here, there was a round of smiles and recognition all around the restaurant. The foreigner, he can make an intelligible sound!

When I had to run out to the bank to exchange for more pesos to pay for our meal, the teller absolutely swooned over my Australian passport. What a beautiful country! The kangaroo on the front cover!

We learned that the great Benny More, who gets regular play on our iPod, was from Cienfuegos.

And we learned that Cienfuegos is not the metropolis. It is not La Habana. There is not an easy selection of places to go hear fantastic live music that doesn't quite fit your pre-conceived notions of what you might hear in Cuba, as there was when I visited Havana 20 years ago.

We learned a few brief things about Cienfuegos. We made friends with a bartender, talking about baseball, who gave me the great heartwarming compliment of saying that my Spanish was better than his English. Alisa dove into the provisioning, as is her wont and her lot, and had a dozen little insights, buying produce from streetcarts with their ancient balance scales in pounds and standing in fruitless queues in the hot sun for eggs.

(She learned to mistrust any man wearing hot pink pants after both the bicitaxi driver who dropped her and Elias at the tchotchke market even though she was sure he had understood that she was looking for eggs [to devil for Christmas Eve] and the man making the undercooked pizzas that had her fleeing for the shade of the closest alcove, certain that she was about to vomit in the street in the middle of the packed noontime city, both were wearing hot pink pants. The alcove turned out to be the entrance to a kitchen. A kindly worker found Alisa sitting on the ground and Elias hovering uncertainty, and showed her to a chair and fanned her face until she recovered.)

Elias loved our meal in the peso restaurant unreservedly. We each had a salad and a heaping plate of rice and a plated of grilled pork or fish and boiled yucca and a pitcher of guava juice to go around. The pitcher of water that we began with elicited an idle family conversation about microbiological provenance. Alisa and Eric ended up paying the price, heavily and for days. Elias and I got lucky. That was the best lunch I ever ate, he said immediately after we were done and I had returned from the bank to pay. He didn't have to regret at the experience the way that his brother and mother did.

We saw the way that people in the restaurant treated us with dignity. Foreigners weren't unknown there, in the middle of the old city, but they weren't an everyday occurrence in that particular peso restaurant. The man and girl working in the restaurant weren't used to dumbing down their Spanish for visitors, and were visibly amused at our incoherence, but also dealt with us as individual people and not one of a class of not-quite-humans of another sort.

And, ultimately, we learned once again in Cienfuegos that we are not city people. After a few days we were quite ready to bugger off for the first deserted anchorage that we could find.

~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!

Monday, December 26, 2016

In conversation with Alisa a while back, I expressed the idea that we Galactics might have already had enough experience of delightful deserted tropical islands to last us a double lifetime. Maybe it was time for us to put in some city time, to have more in-depth interaction with either Colombian or Cuban culture.

Well. That idea lasted through about four days of contact with an actual Cuban city.

Which is not to say that we didn't love Cienfuegos. It's just that, with Christmas approaching, we started to feel the draw of being off somewhere idyllic, far from the maddening crowd.

Which is where we are today, on this Christmas 2016. To be specific, we are anchored off one of the cayos that dot the south coast of Cuba. This place isn't so obvious in its delights that it attracts any number of visiting yachts. Aside from a few fruitful interactions with local fishermen, we are on our own.

The water here is blue. The beach is a long dinghy ride to get to, but the sand is all ours once we're there. Just us and the shorebirds and the pelicans plunge-diving inside the reef.

Santa Claus found us, as he has found us every year, wherever we are. It has been endearing to see how the boys were slipping into Santa disbelief over recent months, based no doubt on their social interactions in the wider world, but how completely they have suspended that disbelief for the actual event.

And while we were eating deviled seabird eggs for Christmas last year in the Falklands, and Christmas geese shot by our friend Leiv, this holiday finds us feasting on snapper and lobster provided by said fishermen. As I write this, the boys are playing with some new toys in the aft cabin, while the main cabin is filling with the delightful smell of Alisa's famous fish cakes. Lunch is going to be good.

So, that's us on this holiday. Cross us off your list of people to worry about.

And, if you have been following us on the blog this last year, let me take the opportunity to thank you for your interest, and to wish you and yours the full promise of a holiday of peace and redemption, and the celebration of light at the darkest moment, if you have the good fortune to be passing the day somewhere in the farther reaches of the Northern Hemisphere, where the original spirit of the pagan holiday is so well served by scene of wintry dark and cold.

While we are finally back in the Northern Hemisphere after eight Christmases in a row in the Southern, we are still suffering in a latitude where clothing and activities poorly match the spirit of the holiday. Shirts optional, shoes not to be contemplated, a serious bout of family free diving expected to break out presently.
~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!

In conversation with Alisa a while back, I expressed the idea that we Galactics might have already had enough experience of delightful deserted tropical islands to last us a double lifetime. Maybe it was time for us to put in some city time, to have more in-depth interaction with either Colombian or Cuban culture.

Well. That idea lasted through about four days of contact with an actual Cuban city.

Which is not to say that we didn't love Cienfuegos. It's just that, with Christmas approaching, we started to feel the draw of being off somewhere idyllic, far from the maddening crowd.

Which is where we are today, on this Christmas 2016. To be specific, we are anchored off one of the cayos that dot the south coast of Cuba. This place isn't so obvious in its delights that it attracts any number of visiting yachts. Aside from a few fruitful interactions with local fishermen, we are on our own.

The water here is blue. The beach is a long dinghy ride to get to, but the sand is all ours once we're there. Just us and the shorebirds and the pelicans plunge-diving inside the reef.

Santa Claus found us, as he has found us every year, wherever we are. It has been endearing to see how the boys were slipping into Santa disbelief over recent months, based no doubt on their social interactions in the wider world, but how completely they have suspended that disbelief for the actual event.

And while we were eating deviled seabird eggs for Christmas last year in the Falklands, and Christmas geese shot by our friend Leiv, this holiday finds us feasting on snapper and lobster provided by said fishermen. As I write this, the boys are playing with some new toys in the aft cabin, while the main cabin is filling with the delightful smell of Alisa's famous fish cakes. Lunch is going to be good.

So, that's us on this holiday. Cross us off your list of people to worry about.

And, if you have been following us on the blog this last year, let me take the opportunity to thank you for your interest, and to wish you and yours the full promise of a holiday of peace and redemption, and the celebration of light at the darkest moment, if you have the good fortune to be passing the day somewhere in the farther reaches of the Northern Hemisphere, where the original spirit of the pagan holiday is so well served by scene of wintry dark and cold.

While we are finally back in the Northern Hemisphere after eight Christmases in a row in the Southern, we are still suffering in a latitude where clothing and activities poorly match the spirit of the holiday. Shirts optional, shoes not to be contemplated, a serious bout of family free diving expected to break out presently.
~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!

Saturday, December 17, 2016

So, re. Eric, this was the second time that we've had cause to pick up the satphone and enquire of my sister the pediatrician about the funny noises he was making while attempting to breathe.

The first time was in Ra'ivavae, in the Austral Islands.

This time was between Haiti and Jamaica, though more on the Haitian side.

In her been-through-this-before pediatrician's voice my sister reassured me that 99% of dealing with croup is keeping your cool.

After that she kindly talked me through the pharmaceutical options at our disposal.

For most of the morning we had been drifting off the coast of Haiti, listening to the sails bang about and waiting for the wind to return.

By the time I was consulting with my sis the wind was back in a little way.

And shortly after we hung up it was back for real, in more vigor than the 12 knots promised by the forecast.

The Jamaica Channel is something of a funnel for shipping and soon after I had us powered up and under weigh on the new breeze I was taking it all down again to do a half-arsed heave-to let a ship go by.

So yeah, I was thinking as I ground various winches and pulled on various bits of string and sent Elias downstairs for an updated Closest Point of Approach report - keeping your cool. We can probably do that.

That was something to think of, as was the high eroded coast of Haiti, which by this point had disappeared in the haze behind us.

How many sick kids were on that coastline, without a satphone for calling the doc, and a bottle of prednisolone at hand?

And how is it our outrageous fortune to be the ones with the satphone and the prednisolone and a yacht of our own to take us here and there at a whim?

~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!

Thursday, December 15, 2016

"Well, we've been sick on passage plenty of times," I said to Alisa before we left Bonaire. "So this shouldn't be different."

I was referring to the fever that Eric was running the day before we left, and the barking cough that has both boys sounding like truants from the isolation ward.

Alisa is sick as well, apparently having relapsed into the bug that had her down for a few weeks already. I'm doing better than anyone else, but my immune system is getting tired of fighting off the viral gifts that my kids keep giving me, and the ear infection from all my wonderful swims in Bonaire is reasserting itself.

So it's a particularly listless crew aboard Galactic for this jaunt across the Caribbean. Eric spent the first day of the passage comatose beneath the saloon table. And it turns out that being sick sick - like fever and cough sick - isn't the same as being seasick when it comes to getting through a day at sea. Not better or worse. Just different.

As a part of the Cuban entry formalities we expect to be boarded by a doctor who will take everyone's temperature. I've been joking a lot about being denied entry based on our collective low-grade fevers, but had to stop. The boys didn't get the humor, and wanted to know exactly where we would go if we were denied entry. As if I know!

On the bright side, Eric hasn't been seasick on this trip. And we're having a ripper sail. Beam reaching, much of the time above 8 knots. We are rapidly pulling Cuba towards us from over the horizon.

(Both Alisa and I have noticed the lack of swell here in the Caribbean. Even with winds in the low 20s, you just don't seem to get a big sea setting up.)

I am struck once again that sailing is far and away the best way to travel. This same floating home that has taken us to the Falklands and South Georgia is about to carry us to Cuba. And we're taking it with us as well, meaning that we'll temporarily have our home and all of our everyday material goods with us in that new-to-us land. I can't imagine a better way of seeing the world.

Nor, right now, can I think of a better way to unplug from the world. After a few weeks of watching the unfolding prologue of America's descent into Pussy Grabbing for Greatness, it is sweet relief to sail away so completely as this.

We expect to be in Cuba in a few days.

~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

You might remember that nearly two years ago our family fun boat, the Little Dipper, was stolen from us at Chiloé Island, in Chile.

The Little Dipper was an 8' Walker Bay sailing dinghy. And ever since she was whisked away in the dark of the night, Alisa has been set on finding us a replacement.

Well, you can see where this is going. Someone told Alisa about a Walker Bay for sale here in Bonaire...she tracked down the seller...and a day later we had a replacement Walker Bay.

And, even better, the seller took Fernando from us, the wonderful gift of a hard dinghy that replaced the Little Dipper and saw us all through the canales of Patagonia, securing the safety of the mothership with many a line ferried ashore to a stout tree. The seller (a lovely guy, Alisa reports) took Fernando away in his pickup, and came back the next day with the $200 USD he'd sold her for...which went a ways towards defraying the purchase price of the Walker Bay.

It was all still a bit on the expensive side to get this replacement boat when we had a perfectly good hard dinghy. But the boys are over the moon. And it was a joy for me to watch Elias immediately jump into the boat to sail around the anchorage for an hour or two.

Particularly when it became clear that the land ahead of us, Colombia, was a land of marinas where visiting yachts were concerned.

I'd love to spend some time in Colombia. But if we're going to have to stay in a marina anyway, and this is our one-and-only (please, god) visit to the Caribbean, then maybe we should go stay in a marina in Cuba instead.

So! I overcame my severe allergy to authority long enough to ask the US Coast Guard, "Mother, may we?" in my sweetest voice. And today we got the answer (above).

So as soon as I finish off these damn research proposals (may they go forth and be fruitful) and finish a few pressing boat jobs (some things never change), we're gonna catch the first thing smokin'.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

So, we're here in Bonaire, one of a long line of yachts moored off the main (only?) town.

The land is - just there - right over our bow. Close enough that I can easily hear the excellent live music being played on the weekends.

Elias and mate, off for a snorkel

But even though we are only 150 meters or so from land, it's now more than a week since I set foot in the dirt. And that last foray was just a quick dash to illicitly stuff a bag of our trash into a dumpster.

My last real land experience, a classic sailor's afternoon of cruising various shops for things that might be persuaded to work as boat parts, was ten days or so ago.

I find that I'm liking this all-aquatic existence.

Bonaire is a perfect place to get your exercise in the water. Every day I swim, usually for an hour or so, down the row of yachts and back.

The boys take recess from school every morning by jumping off the boat into the water about a hundred times in a row. I take a break from my research grant proposal writing and join them.

We pretty regularly take Galactic to one of the dive moorings around the island for a session of family snorkeling.

Elias is learning to scuba dive. Eric has suddenly gone from being a very poor, very reluctant swimmer to being one of those half-fish/half-boy creatures that you see growing up on traveling sailboats. And today Elias and his 8-year-old mate from Jadean took our inflatable, Smooches, and went off on an adult-free snorkeling safari.

True, it came to a premature end because Elias cannot always get the outboard started. But I love to see him and other kids off doing stuff on their own.

So for now, as I toil away at the science salt mines, and we occasionally grumble about the Caribbean, and how it's nothing like our beloved Pacific, we look up and realize that we've got about the best thing going that we could wish for.

An evening swim. Eric is still light enough to bodily throw off the boat.

Monday, December 5, 2016

The world is giving every indication of not being satisfied with a slow boil.

More and more we worry that a full boil is in the cards.

And we wonder what storm of steam will wait us on land.

Stupidity trumpets its own virtue. Three Orwells would be kept busy overtime.

Bleaching

In my professional life, I have a more than casual acquaintance with the empirical view. I, who stare at data for a living, have been a bit more than at a loss with data describing the Arctic this winter.

The world changes, every bit as fast as the world possibly can.

We have had the great good fortune to fall in with a sailing family from South Africa who are mad keen divers. The dad is a PADI instructor and was just getting their 8-year-old daughter into the introductory class, and getting her a dive partner would be convenient. Which has been in turn terribly convenient for Elias. Thanks so much, guys.

Meanwhile, dangerous children appear to have locked themselves in the conductor's compartment.

Why, given how rapidly we are changing the world out from under our feet, would anyone in any position of power pay attention to science? Of course, given who we are as human beings, you would only expect that someone in a position to act for the greater good would decide that publicly putting his head up his own ass would be the appropriate and cautionary thing to do.

(I thought, briefly, about looking for a less indelicate metaphor there. But if Flaubert couldn't make the stars cry and had to settle for beating out rhythms on a cracked pot, well then. Who am I?)

Thanksgiving on Galactic. Tom there has a lot in common with us. He's retired from the marine biology world. He's also a dual Ameri-Aussie. And he once supervised one of my PhD supervisors! We last saw Tom in Cape Town, and then he rocked up in Bonaire in time for the sailors' classic - a brief but fun hangout.

So, really, I should be reading some Orwell. This is clearly the time for the consolations of literature. But I find myself embarked on a long biography of Thelonious Monk just now, and so have had to make do with some fragments of Auden for any literary perspective.

Auden from the 1930s. Not the thing to lighten your mood.

But Auden does give us Dance, dance, for the figure is easy, / The tune is catching and will not stop. Which is as close to a motivating philosophy as we have come on Galactic.

So lately the idea of some grand gesture has been gaining currency among the Galactics. We consider voyaging distances and timelines of season that are clearly in combination not productive of practicable ideas.

But still. Does this feel like the time for practicality? We do yearn for that grand gesture. We aspire to be Gallic.

Because, really. There are a few true things that I have found to do in my life, and a few true things that Alisa and I have found together and those things happened mostly in Alaska where the scope and beauty of the world can be, for weeks at a time, all that you need to account for. And we've found something like that at sea as well, with our family.

Though finding your way through the mundane weeds of shore can be tiring work for your average carthorse, at sea the verities are all there is. They scream at you with every green flash sunset. They toss you back and forth with every passing wave.

So now, though we're sitting at Bonaire, where I can get my science work done, we are dreaming with our eyes wide open.

Sunday, November 27, 2016

I know that Twice in a Lifetime readers are geographically switched on. But just for some perspective...

In another lifetime, one that does not involve me working in marine science while we're also traveling the world, Galactic would be sitting in some anchorage in Cuba, and we would be wrapping our heads around the strange travelers' luck that saw us in that nation on the day that Fidel Castro died.

However, we do find ourselves in this particular everyday (and increasingly interesting) world of ours. And I do pour a tonne of effort into trying to "make discoveries, and share them with others", as E.O. Wilson so winningly defined the job of a scientist.

So, after our cracker of a sailing year, which began in the Falklands and saw us cross the Atlantic twice and finally visit South Georgia after years and years of thinking about it, it has been time for me to tend my discovery garden. I have been lucky enough to be funded to work on a long-standing pet idea of mine with an excellent group of collaborators who know much more than I do about all sorts of things about how the ocean works.

And while I'm very grateful that this work got funded, it means...doing a lot of work. And then there is the scientist's lot of continually looking for more funding, and a second project that is just getting off the ground...and, well. I'm becoming afraid that our boys' most enduring memory of sailing with dad will be me, sitting at the chart table with ear plugs in, looking at the laptop with a face suggesting that I'm in the final round of the World Grumpy Stare-Down competition.

All of which is the lead-in to say that Alisa and I, very far into the first decade of our life afloat, are waking up to the joys of straight-line travel. Cuba would have been...a big detour. And as worthwhile as it would have been (had we the time, and were my work not so internet-dependent), we are happy for once to just travel from point A to point B. Which in this case, means going from Curaçao to Panama via Colombia.

With one brief detour. We could not resist the temptation for a little backtrack from Curaçao to Bonaire to make up for the family snorkeling deficit that has been building ever since we sailed to Patagonia.

So here we are now, and we had a fine day of seeing the underwater sights today.

But...Bonaire.

I imagine it's a wonderful place to live, and I will plead guilty to having seen very little of the place, but...what a distressingly boring destination for a visit.

We're having fun and all, and I know we've only scratched the surface of the Caribbean. But it's hard to escape the idea that this entire sea exists only to remind sailors of how great the Pacific really is.

We're going through one of those periods when we don't take many photos. Here's one of Willemstad, in Curaçao. The brightly-painted buildings are meant to be iconic in some way...

Willemstad does have an excellent slavery museum, which A. and the boys visited while I was away in the States.

Saturday, November 19, 2016

I swear up and down that I want nothing to do with that awful sailors' habit of talking about boat maintenance.

(Just kill me now!)

Normally, I talk about boat maintenance only with Alisa, after the kids are asleep, in the dead of the night, with the curtains drawn and a "to do" list growing under the pen held in her shapely fingers.

Boat maintenance. It's personal that way.

But, for all my denialism, boat maintenance is a huge part of my life. It's my hobby, it's how I while away my idle hours (ha!). It's how we've managed all the crossings that have gotten our family safely (so far!) from here to there. And, with my sideline career in marine biology that both allows us to keep sailing and keeps me forever slightly time-poor for doing the sailing, boat maintenance is my nagging regret, that part of life that I always feel just a little behind on.

So, with all that as a background, perhaps it's appropriate to, well, celebrate boat maintenance for once. Sure, the individual jobs might still give me varying degrees of heartbreak and heartburn. I'm not really handy, and even nine and a half years in, some of these jobs can be too much effort to be healthy.

But on the other hand...how good a problem is that, to have a life that is dominated by the maintenance of your own magic carpet?

The dang thing was occupying about a third of my maintenance time budget all by itself. We have beefed up our solar and wind power to the point where we didn't really need it. And finally getting up the gumption to rip the thing out gave us two things that every sailor should crave - simplicity and space.

How good is that?

The beast in cartu

And the scabby hole that was left after it was gone

The hole, de-scabbed. Below: Nature abhors a vacuum, nowhere more than on a traveling sailboat. We now call the hole the "sail locker"

And my next trick! Replacing the transmission in Curaçao. 95F/35C in the engine room. Learn a lesson from the Brazilian sailors - only a speedo will do in this situation.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

We picked this one up in South Africa - a memoir of family sea-going life with a not-so-good father.

The author, Martinique Stilwell, is very good on the child's perspective of how life turns out when parents are derelict in their duties, and how parents make a long series of choices for their children when they decide that it's too much bother to educate them.

The story is from the tail end of the 1970s, when there were a lot more parents out there happy to let their children grow up (euphemistically) free and (actually) ignorant. But the book does offer an interesting perspective for contemporary parents disinclined to put effort into their kids' education.

Monday, November 14, 2016

The only good part of being in the US when the White Power candidate was elected to the highest office of the land was that on election night I happened to be in the company of the best man from my wedding. He and I went out and got drunk, both thoroughly and publicly.

It didn't make me feel any better, really.

So that hopeful feeling about returning to the home country? That has been replaced by something much more wary.

We do all have Australian passports, of course. And a boat that experience tells us is probably adequate to the task of sailing back to Hobart.

I remember going through the "we're outta here" phase on election night. I think it was mostly between drinks number six and nine. I found myself declaiming, to anyone who would listen, "I hope that works out for all y'all!"

But the draw of Alaska is strong. There is also the thing about not wanting to be driven out of your country, but I find that consideration works on me only when Alaska is part of the equation. Without the Great Land, I think I'd prefer to go and be middle class in Oz, thanks much.

So, when we exit the Panama Canal early next year (everything going to plan), we expect to turn right for Hawai'i, rather than left for Fatu Hiva. Unless the Pussy Grabber In Chief has managed to start a particularly egregious war in the first couple months of his administration.

The year so far, as seen by the Caribbean Safety and Security Net

So. That leaves us in the Caribbean for a couple more months. It seems like a pretty trivial concern at this point, but we have so far completely failed to see the magic of the Caribbean. Our loathing for crowds and very low tolerance for crime risk are a tough combo here. See the map of reported thefts, assaults, and general non-fun sailor moments above.

We had thought about heading up to Cuba, but a chance comment from some Canadian friends about how Cuba wasn't such a fascination for them as it was for American sailors resonated with me. I had a visit to Cuba with that same best man about 19 years ago, and it was great. I don't think I really need to go again.

We thought about Guatemala as well, but very little research told us that it was the kind of place where sailors lock themselves into their boats at night behind stainless steel bars. Not the Galactic way, that.

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

That's us Galactics. We're in the US and on hiatus from the sailing life.

For me, that means a period of immersion in the science life (above).

I've been thinking a lot about the practice of science.

Like the difference between skepticism and conservatism in science - the former is the foundation of our approach, but it can too easily transform into the latter, in which we're skeptical about everything but the status quo paradigm.

I've been thinking about how our current understanding of the problems I work on is fundamentally wrong in some way. That error will be painfully obvious in the future, but it is so hard for us to see the error now.

I've been thinking about the paths that a scientist can take in their career. You can contribute to the incremental progress of the larger community, which is guaranteed to produce results over time - a safer approach. Or you can step back and try to see a path that everyone else has missed, and which might give a shortcut that can bypass a decade of more incremental work - a much riskier approach!

And I've been thinking about how difficult it is to make a really useful contribution in a field where there are a lot of really smart people working really hard on the same questions.

Science, like sailing, rewards the state of being all-in.

In between science meetings and time spent navel-gazing on the questions above, I have a two-week break in which I've joined Alisa and the boys as we catch up with our State-side loved ones.

Monday, October 17, 2016

If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about. -Sterling HaydenReader "horizonstar" left that quote as a comment to my post about opportunity costs.

While I admire the notion that's expressed there, I admit to some reservations. I'm not one to romanticize hardship. There have been many times when I've been happy to be working enough that we have relatively deep pockets for maintaining Galactic.

But then we put the barky into a marina in Curaçao, and the sentiment expressed in that quote made a whole lot more sense.

The marina in Curaçao

We had a pretty good excuse for being there. In order to leave Galactic in Curaçao so that I could get some work done in the States and we could all visit family, we had to put her in customs bond. And that required putting the boat in a marina.

The place is a sterile nothing that was created as a part of a tourism mega-development. It's quite expensive. But at least we had the excuse of leaving the boat to explain our presence.But there were quite a few other crews living aboard in the marina, with no apparent excuse on offer. And the scene was dull. To paraphrase a good friend's comments on visiting his in-laws: never have so few, with so much, done so little. The marina is full of super high-end "cruising" boats that are busy doing nothing. The people living aboard them seem to have very carefully recreated their home culture in this new place, and the dockside scene has all the verve and authenticity of any beach condo community anywhere.By contrast, the anchorage in Spanish Waters that we had just left felt like a thrilling, anarchic place. And believe me, as anchorages go, Spanish Waters is pretty low on the thrilling/anarchic scale.But there is a fundamental upside to being anchored as opposed to being tied to the dock. You have a wonderful moat around you, keeping the rest of the world at a respectful distance. And at anchor you're keeping alive the feeling of contingency and impermanence that is the essence of living on a sailboat. The outcome of your voyage is still in doubt. You could pull the hook at any time, and suddenly avail yourself of the great sailor's freedom of being on the way from here to there. When your boat is tied to the dock, on the other hand, it is literally and metaphorically tied to land. Your voyage is over for now. And nothing very worthwhile will happen with your boat until you untie it again.Our neighbor boats in that marina are variously weighted down with watermakers and gensets, those two great tools for maintaining the life of land on a boat. But still their owners pay perfectly good money to forsake any feeling of freedom, just for the comfort of those two leashes to land, the power cord and the water hose. I wonder if it isn't the terrible handicap of wealth that keeps them there. Once your boat and its accouterments are astronomically expensive, it might be so much more comforting to live behind a locked gate. And to pay a subset of the dark-skinned locals to protect you against the imagined depredations of their kin.

Ah, but! Into this sad scene come the crews of Itacaré, Gentileza, and El Caracol - two Brazilian families living in the marina, and their friends, a Portuguese family, anchored just outside, whom our family had the good fortune to fall in with.This mob instantly swept Alisa and our kids into their orbit of fun. Elias and some of the dads involved discovered a shared deep appreciation for fishing. And after I was away in Oregon on my work trip, Elias even got to go out on a blokes-only fishing mission with the fathers. I think this kind of exposure to role models who aren't me is a very good experience for a boy Elias' age.And thus, one of my great motivating beliefs as a traveler: there are good people everywhere.

Thursday, October 6, 2016

So, of course we crossed the equator on this recent passage from South Africa to the Caribbean. It was our third crossing. And the increasing maturity of our crew is marked by the changing way that we celebrate crossing the line.

This was our first crossing, on Pelagic in the Pacific in 2008. None of us have crossed the line under sail before, so we have no shellbacks among us to preside as King Neptune. Elias is standing in, as befits an occasion where the normal maritime hierarchy ought to be reversed.

And this was our second crossing, on Galactic in 2011. That of course is your faithful correspondent as Neptune. This time around, it was only Eric who was initiated into that select fraternity of those who have sailed across the equator.

But! Look what happened when we crossed this time. We had a dance party. Before too long the boys will be joining us in the ceremonial tot of rum.

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Well. Our little Alaskans-in-training on Galactic are very much into killing what they eat. Or at least eating what I kill for them. Check out Eric's smile in the pic above. He's about to levitate with joy.

So, while there's a lot of things that the boys seem to like, or at least accept, about being at sea, nothing fires their enthusiasm like catching a fish.

And this passage from South Africa was very good for the fishing. If nothing else, we put in enough hours of trolling to expect a few seafood feeds out of the deal.

So here are the boyish smiles that did not get away.

Elias' first mahi mahi

Elias' first marlin. (We let it go.)

Ascension Island. The best-fishing anchorage in our 9 years of sailing.Not humanly possible to be any happier than these two boys.

Eric's first-ever pelagic fish. Check out the fighting belt!

Wahoo for dinner! And breakfast and lunch and dinnerand breakfast and lunch and dinner

The mahi mahi that Elias caught for our 15th anniversary dinner

I keep telling the boys that Alisa can fillet a salmon much better than I can.

Friday, September 30, 2016

We sailed across the breadth and half the length of the Atlantic. Day after day, week after week, wave after wave, green flash after green flash. As fast as the wind cared to carry us.

You take on a challenge that big with your family for company and only your own skills and wherewhithal to rely on and you'll know - the world is all the stage our ambition needs. Impossibly big, but within the reach of our most serious efforts. Those most serious efforts that carry us into joy.

That life our family made for those weeks, in the odd confines of the boat. Where we lived overarched by the endless sky, while able to walk only twenty steps in one direction.

Look at that life now! It was as big as the world.

We left South Africa on August 3. We arrived in Curaçao on September 24. That makes 52 days on passage, counting the three days each that we spent in St. Helena, Ascension, and Grenada.

As always, land life has caught up with us in port, and the dream that was our life at sea fades into disbelief. We know it happened, and I look back at my journal and marvel at the scratchings there. What thoughts were occupying me, and how do I make sense of them now?

Could it really have been that good? That's the question that always stays with Alisa and me.

South From Alaska

South From Alaska is the story of our sail from Alaska to Australia, begun when Elias was 10 months old. First published in Australia by NewSouth, now on Kindle and in paperback.

"…prose so beautiful, and with such a dose of self-deprecating comic relief, that you yearn to be there with them..." Cruising World

"essential reading for anyone contemplating voyaging with very young children." Lin Pardey

"Litzow writes from the heart." Fatty Goodlander

"evocative and powerfully visual" The Age (Melbourne)

"eminently readable" The Sydney Sun-Herald

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Twice In A Lifetime

When we left Alaska to sail to Australia with our toddler for crew, we thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. But then we had our second child, and bought our second boat, and sailed across the Pacific a second time. We ended up living aboard for ten years, and sailed back to Kodiak in 2017, with a total of three Pacific crossings and two Atlantic crossings behind us.

Now we're dreaming of doing biological research from our boat in the Alaskan Arctic. Stay tuned to see how that one works out!